


5 Courses

by nevereverever



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Anxiety, Cooking, Fluff, Gen, Light Angst, Love, M/M, POV Second Person, Recipe Fic? Is that a tag?, Swearing, TAZ Candlenights Exchange, Team as Family, very light
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-12 21:54:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28642536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nevereverever/pseuds/nevereverever
Summary: How To Throw An IPRE Candlenights Extravaganza in Many, Many Simple Stepswritten by Taako, You Know... from TV? -- Interplanar Hero, Celebrity Chef, and Absolute Mess of a Man
Relationships: IPRE Crew - Relationship, Kravitz/Taako (The Adventure Zone), Lup & Taako (The Adventure Zone), Magnus Burnsides & Merle Highchurch & Taako
Comments: 5
Kudos: 22
Collections: The Candlenights Zone (2020 Exchange)





	5 Courses

**Author's Note:**

  * For [EclecticJace](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EclecticJace/gifts).



> Hi! This is a fic for the TAZ Candlenights Exchange for eclecticjace! It's my first time doing a fic exchange and I had just a huge amount of fun writing it. Hope you don't mind that I first planned a dinner party and then wrote a fic :D

How To Throw An IPRE Candlenights Extravaganza in Many, Many Simple Steps

**Appetizer** \- Brie en croûte with hot pepper jam, other various charcuterie

  1. Wrap your puff pastry (made with your own two hands, natch) around the brie you bought at the farmer's market with Ren last weekend. 
  2. Egg wash it. You are not a monster.
  3. Put it in the oven for some time at some degrees until it is done, figure your own shit out.
  4. Sit on the floor of your kitchen and lean your back against your oven. Trace the spirals of the hardwood and let yourself drift. Listen to your sister and Barry chatting in the living room and feel something old and warm and happy flare to life in your chest. 
  5. Do not smile. What kind of rube smiles to themself while cooking?
  6. Check on your brie. It will look and smell delightful.
  7. Close the oven door and let it finish. Remember the way your aunt used to tell the two of you that 'if you're looking, you're not cooking.' Feel a spark of gratitude that you can remember it at all.
  8. Stand on your tip-toes to reach the hot pepper jelly you made with Angus last month.
  9. Be too short to reach it and feel personally slighted. Check to make sure no one is looking before getting your step stool. Look at his little loopy kid handwriting and feel how it stokes the warm thing in your chest.
  10. Smile to yourself, you rube.
  11. Realize you could have gotten the jar with your Mage Hand. Feel like an idiot.
  12. Take out your brie before it burns.



**Salad** \- Kale, apple, goat cheese, and walnuts

  1. Retrieve the kale, walnuts, and apples you need for your salad from Merle. 
  2. Be extremely grossed out about the way Merle talks about harvesting the kale. Call him a disgusting plant fetishist because that is what he is and he deserves to know it.
  3. Call him a weird, old man and watch him grin.
  4. Listen to him talk about Mookie's shell collection while you cut your apples into perfect crescent moons. Toss them with lemon juice to prevent browning.
  5. Not Mookie's shells. The apples.
  6. Listen to more gross plant talk when you massage the kale. Feel like you deserve it a little bit for massaging your kale, but do it anyway. Do not let him see it on your face.
  7. When your boyfriend comes home, kiss him on the cheek, and make him taste your vinaigrette.
  8. You know that your vinaigrette is perfect, you haven't fucked this up in decades, but he will compliment you and it will make you happy. 
  9. Shell the walnuts because apparently the man who kept your family just barely alive for decades cannot be bothered to do it himself.
  10. Verbally berate him for this and watch him smile. Struggle to hold back your grin and make up for it by snapping your dishrag at his stupid head.
  11. Develop a nut-cracking spell in your head and then realize that it is extremely stupid.
  12. Try to remember to write it down anyway because stupid spells are the best kind.
  13. Toast the walnuts in a dry frypan.
  14. Ask Merle where he collected them and listen as he waxes poetic about his god and the forest and the bounty of the trees and all of his favorite foraging spots. Remember why you keep him around.
  15. Add toasted walnuts and crumbled goat cheese to the kale and apples and toss to combine.



**Soup** \- brown butter and thyme butternut squash soup

  1. Move over for your sister when she appears at your side while you stir your slowly reducing squash soup.
  2. Feed her a spoonful without saying anything.
  3. Feel a little slighted when she effortlessly identifies every herb that was in your bouquet garni.
  4. Realize it was sitting right next to you and elbow her in the gut.
  5. Hand her a knife and some thyme and tell her to make herself useful instead of loitering in your kitchen. 
  6. Ask her how she's doing and watch her smile fade a little. Watch her hands carefully because her knife handling skills were always worse than yours and her body is only a year old.
  7. Listen to her talk about how hard it's been to stay real and whole the past few days. Irrationally feel like it is your fault. Watch her fingers get perilously close to the edge of the knife.
  8. Take it out of her hand and bump her hip with yours.
  9. Tell her you love her.
  10. Remember how much you love her laugh as it echoes in your kitchen. Laugh when she jokes that you admitting your feelings must be a Candlenights miracle. 
  11. Put your soup on the back burner and cover it to preserve heat.
  12. Hug your sister as tight as you can. Ask her if she can feel your arms around her and feel her nod into your shoulder. Resist the sudden urge to cry.
  13. Seriously, don't cry, it will ruin your makeup and you do not have time to reapply. It's Candlenights motherfucker, this is serious.



**Entree** \- Roast duck with orange and ginger

  1. Grin when you see the little sad look in Magnus' eyes when you tell him that you are having duck for dinner tonight.
  2. Watch him unsuccessfully try to hide the wooden duck that he carved behind his back.
  3. Snatch it out if his hands because you are dextrous as fuck and they are not allowed to forget it.
  4. Trace the little duck's white chef hat and pink apron and little painted elf ears with your finger. 
  5. Ask him if the duck has a name and fucking lose it when this big idiot that you happen to love tells you without hesitation that its name is Chef Duckgang Quack.
  6. Reluctantly high five the man. He deserves it.
  7. Scoff when he asks if this means you will find a different Candlenights bird. Show him the crackling brown skin of your roasting bird and make him smell the orange and ginger notes and watch his resolve to not eat the duck melt away.
  8. Put Chef Quack on the windowsill above your sink. Push Magnus towards the potatoes and tell him to get scrubbing. No loiterers in your kitchen.
  9. Do not look at the soft, fond look in his eyes.
  10. Do not squirm hard enough to actually pull away from the hug he gives you. Maybe you're not all that dextrous after all.



**Final Touches**

  1. Let your kitchen become a whirlwind as dinner approaches. Get into your Zen Dinner Party Mode and try not to freak out.
  2. Come on, man, you've practiced this.
  3. Make sure that Barry got the place cards right and come to the stunning realization that you had forgotten that every year for 100 years you sat between Lup and Lucretia at Candlenights.
  4. Let your hand hover over the place cards. Let it eat at you a little bit. Swap her card with Angus' on the next plate and feel guilty.
  5. Hear a timer go off in the kitchen and run to go figure out what it was for.
  6. Try to forget about it.
  7. You're great at that.
  8. Send out your appetizers 30 minutes before everything else is ready.
  9. Make sure everything is hot before it goes on the table.
  10. Make sure nothing is poison before it goes on the table.
  11. Add your garnishes like the good little chef you are.
  12. Double-check that nothing is fucking poison.
  13. Maybe have like, a very small panic attack and Prestidigitation your makeup back to perfection. Prestidigitation the food hot because it cooled while you were having an extremely small panic attack.
  14. Breathe.
  15. Salad, soup, sides, main, dessert. Like you've done a hundred times before. Breathe.



**Eat, You Idiot Wizard!**

  1. Sit down between your twin and the kid and have dinner with your family. Love them. Listen to them joke and bicker and reminisce and try not to be sad about the 12 years you didn't have them because they are here now. Eat all the perfect food that you spent nine hours cooking. Play footsie with your boyfriend. Realize that you separated Ango from the other kids but remember that he probably doesn't mind.
  2. See Lucy's little frown at the chair between you. Watch Lucy chat about abjuration spells with your magic boy. Don't hate her in your heart. She is your little sister.
  3. Drink to Capn'port's toast and savor the incredibly expensive bubbly you are drinking. Down your flute and steal your twin's. 
  4. Talk until the sun sets. Talk as dusk settles and the stars come out, twinkling and burning and there. Pour yourself another glass of champagne and taste the goddamn stars. 
  5. Feel your anxious energy start to fall away as the candles burn low and warm. Call Barry disgusting when he kisses your sister on the cheek and then pull Krav in for a full kiss across the table. Get booed.
  6. Love them so much.



**Dessert** \- Tiramisu

  1. Let them clear the table and do the dishes. Let Lup serve dessert. Let control slip out of your fingertips.
  2. Sit on Kravitz's lap in your favorite armchair. Tuck your forehead into the crook of his neck and relish the cool press of his skin against yours. Realize that you are hot because you were standing up cooking in front of a hot oven most of the day.
  3. Press a kiss to his collarbone. Feel someone hand him a plate of something but do not emerge from your place on his shoulder. Take a bite of his tiramisu from his fork when he offers it. It's so good. 
  4. You're an artist, and this was your Fantasy Sistine Chapel, bitch.
  5. Feel the tension slowly bleed from your shoulders as your family sits and chats and eats dessert around you.
  6. Feel a little silly when you start to drift towards sleep as Barry plays a sweet waltz on the piano.
  7. Shiver when Kravitz brushes your hair out of your face and whispers 'you can rest now, my bird' against your forehead, soft enough that nobody but you can hear.
  8. Fall asleep in his arms.
  9. Eat leftovers for breakfast. Repeat yearly, as necessary.



**Author's Note:**

> Drop me a note if you feel so moved! Thanks for reading!


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